Mrs Grey

Sir George Grey (1812–1898) was a soldier, explorer and colonial administrator. The son of an English army officer, he trained at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, before serving in Ireland for six years. In 1836, he approached the Colonial Office with a proposal for an expedition to locate a site for settlement on the north-west coast of Australia. Consequently, he conducted two expeditions during 1838 and 1839 but both were failures, beset by floods, hostilities with Aboriginal people and shortages of food and water. In August 1839, he was appointed resident magistrate at King George Sound and in November married Eliza Spencer (c. 1819–1898), the daughter of the incumbent. During his time in Albany, Grey studied local Aboriginal culture, writing a book that was later republished as a report setting out his beliefs on how best to ‘civilise’ Aboriginal people. Recalled to England, Grey produced an account of his Western Australian expeditions before being appointed Governor of South Australia in October 1840. Eliza gave birth to a son en route to Adelaide, but when the baby died in June 1841, Grey blamed his wife. His tenure in South Australia was noted for his introduction of drastic and much-resented spending cuts, though over five years he nearly balanced the colony’s budget. His intractability marred his subsequent two terms as Governor of New Zealand – from 1848 to 1853 and again between 1861 and 1868 – and his term as Governor of the Cape Colony (between 1854 and 1861). Eliza was never reconciled to life in Adelaide or New Zealand, where contemporaries described her as ‘a perfect devil’, ill-natured, untrustworthy, and given to tantrums. After a nervous breakdown in 1858 she returned to England. During a voyage to South Africa in 1860, Eliza, unhappy in her marriage, confided in a male fellow passenger after which indiscretion Grey insisted on a separation from her. She returned to England and the couple remained separated for the next thirty-seven years. A reconciliation in 1896 was unsuccessful and they both died, after separating again, in late 1898.

Theresa Walker (née Chauncy, 1807–1876) arrived in Adelaide with her sister, Martha Berkeley, and brother-in-law in February 1837. Later the same year, she went to Tasmania, where she met Lieutenant John Walker RN. They married in Launceston in May 1838. Returning to Adelaide, Walker soon began producing wax medallion portraits of settlers and Aboriginal people. In 1841 her works Mocatta and Kertamaroo were shown at the Royal Academy, making her the first resident Australian artist to exhibit there. Following her husband’s bankruptcy and consequent imprisonment, the Walkers lived in Sydney and then Tasmania, Theresa exhibiting in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Geelong between 1845 and 1861 and attracting praise for the accuracy of her likenesses. Widowed in 1855, she remarried in 1856 and lived in Victoria and Mauritius, during which period she was awarded a silver medal at the 1866 Paris Exposition. Back in Australia and widowed again in 1869, Theresa subsisted on what she earned from her wax modelling and was the only woman illustrator employed on biologist Frederick McCoy’s Prodromus of the Zoology of Victoria, published after her death. Along with her sister, Walker is considered South Australia’s first professional artist; and Australia’s first woman sculptor. She died in Melbourne in April 1876 having some months earlier undergone treatment for breast cancer.